Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir

Summary

From the revered New York Times bestselling author comes a touching, insightful, and humorous memoir of an unlikely racewalker and world traveler

Before Lawrence Block was the author of bestselling novels featuring unforgettable characters such as the hit man Keller, private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and time traveler Evan Tanner, he was a walker.

As a child, he walked home from school (mostly because he couldn't ride a bike). As a col-lege student, he walked until he was able to buy his first car (a deep blue 1950 Chevrolet coupe named Pamela, after the Samuel Richardson novel). As an adult, he ran marathons until he discovered what would become a lifelong obsession—never mind if some people didn't think it was a real sport—racewalking.

By that time Block had already spent plenty of time walking through the city of New York. But racewalking ended up taking him all over the country, from New Orleans to Anchorage, from marathons in the punishing heat to marathons in the pouring rain. And along the way, as he began to pen the books that would make him a household name among suspense fans all over the world, he found that in life, as in writing, you just need to take one step after the other.

Through the lens of his adventures while walking—in twenty-four-hour races, on a pilgrimage through Spain, and just about everywhere you can imagine—Lawrence Block shares his heartwarming personal story about life's trials and tribulations, discomforts and successes, which truly lets readers walk a mile in the master of mystery's shoes.

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PART I

1

THE FORECAST WAS RAIN ALL DAY SUNDAY.

Marathons are like football games. Weather’s not enough to cause their cancellation, unless it’s pretty dramatic. A hurricane will do it, but this was February of 2007, the weekend after Mardi Gras, and hurricane season was months away. So it would rain, and we would do what marathoners do when it rains. We’d get wet.

I don’t mind getting wet. When I was a boy my mother assured me I wouldn’t melt, and so far she’s been right about that. Though a year earlier I’d found myself wondering.

That was in Houston, on the last weekend of February 2006, where I participated in a twenty-four-hour race around a two-mile asphalt loop in Bear Creek Park. The race got under way at seven in the morning, and within an hour or so it started raining, and it didn’t entirely quit for eight hours or so. Sometimes it was a drizzle and sometimes it was a downpour, but the rain coming down was the least of it; what drove us all mad was the rain after it had fallen. The course didn’t drain properly, and great sections of our path were ankle-deep in water. It slowed me down and shortened my stride and messed up my feet and did nothing good for my disposition, let me tell you. More to the point, it led me to retire from the race after eighteen hours or so, with 64.25 miles to my credit. That was enough to top my one previous twenty-four-hour race, but only by a mile. I don’t know how far I might have gone in Houston on a dry surface, but I’m fairly sure I’d have managed a few more circuits of the course.

So I really wasn’t looking forward to rain at the New Orleans race. But I’d show up rain or shine. I wouldn’t melt.

MY WIFE, LYNNE, and I flew down to New Orleans on Friday.

(Note, if you will, the commas before and after her name. The sentence would flow better without them, but they’re there for a reason. They indicate that Lynne’s my only wife. I referred earlier to my daughter Amy, and was able to do so without the bracketing commas, because she’s one of three daughters. If I had only one daughter, I’d have to use the commas. If I didn’t use them for Lynne, you’d have every right to suspect me of bigamy. Now this is one of those linguistic niceties like, say, the subjunctive, that seem designed chiefly to make people who are aware of it feel good about themselves. I’d love to leave out those commas, but I don’t want you thinking I’ve got more than one wife. One’s plenty.)

Lynne doesn’t usually accompany me to marathons—she has a life, even if I don’t—but New Orleans is her birthplace and remains very dear to her heart. We’d come down for the Mardi Gras Marathon the previous year, and planned a repeat, but with one signal difference; on Tuesday she’d return to New York, while I’d stay put for a month and get a book written. It was a book I’d gotten absolutely nowhere with for over a year, and I was dreading it, but nowhere near as much as I was dreading the marathon.

Three weeks earlier I’d walked the Pacific Shoreline Marathon, in Huntington Beach, California. It was held on a beautiful seaside course, and the weather was splendid, and I was just cruising along, not pushing the pace, until somewhere around the sixteen-mile point I got a sharp pain in the ball of my foot. It was bad enough so that I might have stopped but for the fact that this was an out-and-back course and the only way to get back to my hotel was to keep walking. The pain was really quite intense, but I was able to walk through it and maintain my pace, and then after four or five miles like that it just went away. I never knew why it vanished, but then again I never knew why it appeared in the first place. I finished the race, got my medal, ate eight or ten oranges and anything else I could find, and went to my room to shower and put my feet up.

And they weren’t in such great shape. My right foot, the one that had given me trouble during the race, had nothing wrong with it where I’d had the pain, not as far as I could determine. But the little toe had taken a beating, and the outer layer of skin on it slipped off like a glove, taking the nail with it. It didn’t hurt all that much, and I was confident I could get along without that layer of skin, and without the nail as well.

Still, I’d had the thing for sixty-eight years…

A COUPLE OF DAYS later I made a guest appearance on The Late Late Show. All I wanted to talk about was walking, but Craig Ferguson kept dragging the conversation back to my books. He wanted to know what I was working on, and of course I wasn’t working on anything.

That was the first weekend in February, and I spent the next three weeks back in New York, doing precious little to prepare for New Orleans. In 2006 they held the race the first weekend in February, before rather than after Mardi Gras, and it had been the scene of my greatest triumph in the sport. I’d completed the race in 5:17, the best time I’d ever recorded at that distance. (I’d gone faster back in 1981, when I’d done five marathons, but in three of them I ran part of the way. I did walk the 1981 Jersey Shore Marathon in 4:53, but I was forty-three at the time, and I was sixty-six when I resumed racewalking in 2005. That 5:17 in New Orleans was my best time since then.)

Not only did I post a personal record time, but I actually won something. New Orleans is one of a handful of marathons with a judged racewalking division, and in due course I received a plaque for having been the second male racewalker. I’d done the same a month earlier in Mobile, but my triumph was somewhat dimmed by the fact that there were only two of us. In New Orleans I was second of seven or eight, and the young Floridian who took top honors only nosed me out by forty-two minutes.

But that was then, and this was now, and that 5:17 looked out of reach. Especially if it rained. And especially if that foot pain I’d encountered in Huntington Beach—and had twinges of during my infrequent training sessions—should happen to return.

THE WEATHER WAS ALL right on Saturday. The day’s highlight was a meeting with Glen Mizer, whom I knew only from his posts on the Walking Site message board. At my suggestion he and Carol had booked a room at Fairchild House, where Lynne and I always stay; it’s on Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District, and marathoners pass it twice, at fifteen and twenty-four miles. Glen came up to our apartment Saturday afternoon and the two of us hit it off immediately. I didn’t have a tape recorder running, but later I would post my best recollection of our conversation on the message board:

Oh, I’m so out of shape it’ll take a miracle to get me to the starting line. I haven’t been out walking since my last race.

You’re ahead of me, fellow. I didn’t even walk in my last race. Some old boys picked me up and carried me across the finish line.

I did get out for a few minutes yesterday, but I had to use a cane.

I had me one of them aluminum walkers.

I was gonna use one this morning, but I lost my balance trying to get up out of the wheelchair.

That chair of yours hand-propelled or motorized?

Glen’s also a racewalker, and younger and faster than I. Lately, however, he’d found himself forced by some sort of indeterminate injury to alternate walking with intervals of slow jogging—slogging, he termed it. Thus he would have to compete as a runner, rather than enter the racewalking category. This news did not break my heart.

We talked about the weather, too. The forecast had changed from rain all day Sunday to rain starting Saturday night and ending an hour or so into the race. We agreed that we’d be out there rain or shine—I suppose Glen’s mother had tipped him off, too, that he wouldn’t melt—but that shine was better. And we left it at that.

Lynne and I went out for dinner to a pizza joint a block away on St. Charles Avenue. I had a bowl of pasta as a sop to tradition. I don’t know that anybody pays a whole lot of attention to carbo-loading these days, and I’m not sure it makes any sense for someone cruising at racewalking pace, but everybody just knows you’re supposed to eat pasta before a marathon. And it’s not as though it amounts to a great sacrifice. It’s pasta, after all, not spiders. What’s not to like?

Though if someone proved, or even strongly suggested, that a marathoner’s performance would improve if he ate spiders the night before a race, well, you can bet there’d be a whole lot of arachnids swimming in marinara sauce…

IT RAINED A LITTLE during the night, but not heavily, and it had stopped well before dawn. I got up early, ate an energy bar for breakfast, got dressed, and pinned on my two number bibs. (Racewalkers were issued an extra bib to wear on one’s back, so that the judges could tell at a glance who was a walker.) Glen was waiting out front and Lynne drove the two of us to the Superdome, where the race would start and finish.

When it did, Glen slogged off and disappeared into the distance. I took it easy, cruising along at a gentle warm-up pace, and for the first three miles or so everything was fine.

Then my foot started to hurt—the right foot, in the same spot that had bothered me in California. It was nowhere near that bad, it was pain I could live with and in fact walk with, but I’d have been happier without it. I knew immediately what I’d pretty much assumed anyway—that my time last year, 5:17, was way out of reach. But that was okay, and I could still get through the race and finish in decent time.

The race course is west, through the French Quarter and out to City Park, where we turned around and followed the same route back to the Superdome. At that point, the race would be over for the half-marathoners, and half over for the rest of us. Around mile 8 or 9, I decided getting through 26 miles was going to be more than I could stand. I decided what I ought to do was go through the half marathon finish at the 13.1-mile point and call it a day.

Now thoughts of this sort are frequent for me. There’s often a point in the course of a race when I decide the hell with it, and the phrase I’m too old for this shit echoes like an old song. The thing is, see, that I never give in to it—or at least I never have. Back in my early forties, when I sometimes raced forty times a year, I never once quit short of the finish line. That record is more a testament to determination than to good sense, as there were a couple of races I would have been well advised to abandon, but so far I’ve always hung in there to the finish line.

(Twenty-four-hour races are a little different, and I’ll get to them later.)

Still, just as thoughts of suicide will get a person through a bad night, so will thoughts of dropping out keep a fellow on his feet. I told myself I’d quit at the halfway point, and when it came time for the half-marathoners to zig left and cross their finish line, I zagged to the right instead along with the rest of the full marathoners.

The course would now head up through the Garden District and on to Audubon Park, where it would make a circuit of the park before heading right back to the Superdome. Prytania Street was the route’s main artery, and Fairchild House was right there on our route, at the fifteen-mile mark and again around twenty-four miles. I’d have to get back to Fairchild House even if I dropped out, so I decided to keep going at least until I got there.

That’s what I’d do. Hang in until I got to Fairchild House, and then go to our room and lie down, and skip the Anchorage Marathon in late June, and never do another of these damned things for the rest of my life.

Lynne was waiting out front at Fairchild House. I told her I was hurting but said I thought I’d stay with it a while more, as it wasn’t getting any worse. So I kept going on Prytania, and I took the little out-and-back detour on Napoleon Avenue, and I was back on Prytania at approximately 17.5 miles, when the little toe on my right foot sent out a spasm of pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It hadn’t really been bothering me enough to mention, its soreness was minor compared to the ache in the ball of the foot, but now, with no warning, it felt as though a tank had run over it. It was indescribable (although that doesn’t seem to have stopped me from trying) and it flared up anew every time I took a step.

All of a sudden I couldn’t do better than a slow and rather pathetic limp. I just stood there for a minute or two, trying to figure out what to do next. If this had happened half an hour earlier, when I was at Fairchild House, the answer would have been obvious. I’d have stopped there and then, no question. But now I was two miles past Fairchild House, and both my choices involved walking; I could walk back or walk on.

And there was the chance that the pain would vanish as abruptly as it had appeared. So I limped on to give it the opportunity.

Didn’t happen. I was limping along when Glen showed up; he’d already reached the turnaround in Audubon Park and was on his way back, and feeling pretty lousy himself; he’d had some sort of sports drink that his stomach wasn’t happy with. He asked me what I was going to do, and said later that, if I’d said I was going to quit, he’d have accompanied me to Fairchild House and quit himself. But for some reason I said I’d push on for a little while, and I did.

It took me an hour to cover the next two miles. What kept me going was the thought of how I’d feel if I started back before reaching the turnaround, only to have the pain recede. I’d really have found that infuriating. So I kept on limping, and tried to ignore the people who asked me if I was okay (No, idiot, if I were okay I’d be walking right) and the helpful soul who wanted to know if I needed electrolyte replacement tablets (Thanks, but what would they possibly do for my toe?). By the time I reached Audubon Park and swung into the 1.5-mile loop around it, I figured out my situation. I was in too much pain to go on and too stupid to stop.

During the park loop, my foot pain lost intensity to the point where I could walk without limping, but still couldn’t manage more than a leisurely pace. That picked up a little by the time I was out of the park and up to the twenty-one-mile marker, and it was then that I realized I was probably going to be able to finish the race. The only question was whether I could reach the finish line before the seven-hour mark, when they were scheduled to shut it down. I didn’t care if it took me every minute of seven hours, didn’t care if I was the last person across the line, but I really wanted to finish.

And the pain backed off. I honestly don’t know how that happened. Barring the intervention of a Higher Power, and I have trouble envisioning one with nothing better to do than enable an aging athlete to persist in his folly, the best I can come up with is this: the protesting nerves decided I clearly wasn’t getting the message, so why bother sending it? The fool’s best interests would be served by stopping, they realized, but he really is too dumb to quit, just as he’s been muttering to himself. So why waste our time on him?

The anthropomorphism aside, I’m not sure this isn’t how it works. Pain, like everything else, exists for a purpose, and the purpose in this instance was to alert the organism to the fact that he’d done damage to a portion of himself. The message had been delivered, and with a vengeance; the message had been ignored; there was accordingly no need to go on sending it, and the transmission ceased.

I tried this theory on a friend, and he shook his head and lectured me on endorphins. My brain started producing endorphins, he told me, and they were better than morphine at drowning pain. Well, okay, but what prompted the brain to send out this tidal wave of endorphins? Exercise? I’d been exercising for hours, and that was what had earned me the pain in the first place. I still like my theory, and there’s room to stick endorphins into it. The mind, realizing that its message was being ignored, ordered up a big batch of endorphins as a mechanism for canceling the message. There!

With the pain gone, I could pick up my pace. I was racewalking at cruising speed by the time I reached Fairchild House, and the last two miles saw me moving at my regular racewalking pace, such as it is. I was going flat out when the finish line came into view, and I sailed across it with a net time of 6:34:25. That was an hour and seventeen minutes longer than the same course took me a year ago, and my slowest marathon ever by a good half hour, and yet it felt like my greatest triumph.

I honestly don’t know what the hell kept me going, I posted in my race report, outside of a deplorable stubborn streak, but whatever it was I’m grateful for it.

THEY HUNG A MEDAL around my neck after I crossed the finish line, and at the top of the stadium ramp there was still plenty of food and drink left. More to the point, there was Lynne, who’d headed for the Superdome after I’d passed her at the twenty-four-mile point. She drove us back to Fairchild House, and in no time at all I was in a chair with my feet up.

It took me a while, though, to take my socks off, because I was afraid of what I would find. I was still surprisingly free of pain, but enough blood had leaked through the sock to assure me that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I did peel the sock off, finally, and the toe didn’t look good, but it didn’t look that bad, either, and it was impossible to guess why it had hurt as severely as it had.

I put a bandage on it and got on with my life. We ate in that night, Lynne went out and came home with a pizza, but the next day I was on my feet and walking around, and the day after that, Tuesday, Lynne drove herself to the airport, turned in our rental car, and flew home. And I set myself up at the desk, switched on my laptop, and started work on the new book.

It went well. Wednesday or Thursday I walked a block to the gym on St. Charles Avenue and joined for a month, and for the rest of my stay I got there a couple of times a week to put in an hour or so on the treadmill, along with a brief workout with weights. The weather was good throughout, cool early on and a good deal warmer toward the end, and I could have walked on the median strip of St. Charles, where the trolleys used to run before Katrina put them temporarily hors de combat. But that struck me as more of an adventure than I wanted. The treadmill was enough.

I’d allowed five weeks for the book, and was done in just over three. (As I said, it went well.) I stayed out the week, took one day for a walk around the French Quarter and another for a stroll up Magazine Street, then took another long walk up Prytania Street to see a movie at a neighborhood theater. I walked a two-mile stretch of the marathon route, and it was like seeing it for the first time. I’d traversed it twice in this year’s marathon and twice a year earlier, and at the time I thought I was well aware of my surroundings, but I never really pay attention to anything but the race. (I don’t wear my glasses when I race or train, I only need them for seeing.) It’s an attractive street, is Prytania, and I was happy to get a good look at its splendid live oak trees and stately homes.

I paid about as much to change my ticket as it had cost me in the first place, and flew home to New York a week early. Lynne read the new book—Hit and Run, my fourth book about a hit man named Keller—and pronounced it terrific, and my agent and editor agreed. Revisions were minimal, and took about an hour. The book was done, and I didn’t have another race until the Anchorage Marathon June 21, and I could walk it or cancel it, as I preferred.

Everything was wonderful. This book, I had decided, would be the last one for which I would contract in advance. From this point on I would simply write books when I wanted to, and submit them for publication after they were complete. Thus I would never be in a position of owing a book to anyone, and that was as close to official retirement as I figured I ever needed to be.

A couple of times a week I put on my sneakers and went out to walk alongside the Hudson. In the past few years they’ve given the waterfront a makeover, and it’s become a wonderful place to train. So I’d go out for an hour or two, and then I’d come home. And read something, or sit in front of the television set.

IT WAS TOWARD the end of March when I came home, and there were a couple of ultramarathon events on the horizon. Earlier I’d been considering the Corn Belt twenty-four-hour, in Iowa, which is held at a quarter-mile track—every four or six hours, I forget which, all the entrants who’d been going counterclockwise switched to clockwise, just to keep the event from becoming boring.

(Actually that’s not the purpose. I think it’s so that you don’t wind up with one leg shorter than the other. And for all that most people I know are gobsmacked by the prospect of the boredom they’re sure would accompany such an event, I don’t think boredom would enter into the equation for me. If I managed to traverse Prytania Street four times without seeing the magnificent houses that line it, how much difference does the scenery make to me? There are people who have run a hundred miles on a treadmill—not over time but in one straight shot—and that doesn’t sound boring, either. It sounds very goddamn demanding, but it doesn’t sound boring.)

Corn Belt takes place the first weekend in May, and I’d thought about it earlier, but never seriously considered it after New Orleans. But a month after Corn Belt was the FANS twenty-four-hour race in Minnesota. (That’s an acronym, and rolls rather more trippingly off the tongue than the Family Advocate Network System, for which the annual race raises funds.) FANS had seemed to have possibilities. I thought about it, and decided I didn’t want to put myself through that kind of an ordeal. I stuck to an easy walk two or three times a week, and watched some TV and read some books, and slid all too comfortably into depression.

I have friends who are subject to clinical depression, and I don’t suffer from anything anywhere near that scale. They can’t get out of bed, they can’t think of anything but killing themselves, and the only thing that keeps them from following through is lack of energy. My malaise is worlds lighter than that, so much so that I almost hesitate to use the word, but there’s no getting around it. Depression is what it is.

So, depressed, I went through the motions of being alive. It was all I could do to check the two message boards for walkers to which I subscribe; I looked in only every few days, and posting anything was out of the question. When I did force myself to go out and walk, my mind was all over the place, thinking about entering the FANS race, then thinking about canceling Anchorage.

Around the end of April, my friend Andy Cable posted a report of his first multiday race, a six-day Sri Chinmoy event held in Queens. (Sri Chinmoy was a spiritual leader who inspired his acolytes to rather extraordinary athletic feats, primarily in endurance races; his organization sponsors such events throughout the world.)

If I hadn’t been depressed I probably would have gone out there to see how Andy was doing. It’s only a subway ride away, but the way I felt it might as well have been in Mongolia. (And I’ve been to Mongolia, and I didn’t have a good time.) Andy hung in there for all six days, and logged a total of 235 miles, and posted a race report consisting chiefly of his explanation of why he’d done so poorly, and what he’d learned from the experience. Six days walking around a one-mile loop in the park! Six days! 235 miles! That’s nine marathons in six days. And he was apologizing for his performance? Sheesh…

BY THE TIME I read Andy’s report, I’d already made a decision of my own. On the 26th of April, I printed out the entry blank and mailed off a check to the people running the FANS race in Minnesota.

I had five weeks to prepare myself to walk for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know if that was enough time, nor did I have any reason to believe my feet would be up to the challenge. They’d given me trouble at Huntington Beach, and they’d put me through hell in New Orleans.

What I did know, as I was quick to explain to Lynne, was quite simply this: Given the choice, I’d rather be hospitalized for exhaustion than depression.

AND IT WORKED.

I signed up one day and went out for a walk the following afternoon. I was out for an hour. I walked two hours the next day, an hour the day after that, then three hours a day later.

Somewhere in the course of those first several days, I stopped being depressed.

Endorphins, no doubt. Exercise, everyone will tell you, induces the brain to produce endorphins, and they in turn engender a feeling of well-being. This is all too frequently described as a runner’s high, and for all the running and walking I’ve done over the years, and all the feeling of well-being it may have engendered, I’ve never experienced anything I’d call a high.

But perhaps the folks who use the term neglected to spend their youth ingesting mood-altering chemicals. What do they know about getting high?

Never mind. What’s noteworthy here, it seems to me, is not that endorphins were the agent of my ascent from depression, but that essentially the same exercise that produced them had failed to do so in the weeks since I’d returned from New Orleans. I’d been walking several times a week for an hour or two, with nothing to show for it but a deepening suntan and a sweaty headband. Now, all of a sudden, the same exercise on the same course was turning me into Little Endorphin Annie.

It wasn’t just the walking. That seemed clear to me. It was the fact that signing up for the race had given my walking in particular and my life in general the illusion of purpose. I was not out there walking to feel better, or walking to stay in shape, or walking to stifle my inner couch potato. I was walking with the noble goal of preparing myself to—to what, exactly?

Why, to walk innumerable 2.4-mile laps around a blameless lake in Minnesota.

And could I do it? Did I have enough time to get in enough training? And would my feet hold up?

Unanswerable questions, all of them. At worst, I figured, I could train sufficiently to cover 26.2 miles around Lake Nokomis. That’s the length of a marathon, and if I did that much I could add Minnesota to my marathon life list. I told myself I’d be satisfied with that, but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d been in three twenty-four-hour races since July of 2005, and in each one I’d improved, albeit very slightly, on my previous performance. The most recent race was at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in July 2006, and I’d managed 66.3 miles. So what I wanted in Minnesota was to break that record. And I wanted to break it resoundingly. It would be nice to walk my age and hit sixty-eight miles. It would be even nicer to go seventy.

It would also probably be impossible, but right now that didn’t really matter. I was walking, and walking for a reason, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel genuinely good about it.

2

I’VE BEEN A WALKER ALL MY LIFE.

Well, wait a minute. That’s not entirely true. Before I was a walker I was a crawler, and before that I just sort of lay there like a lump.

Or so I’ve been told, but I can’t say I remember any of that. My conscious childhood memories are all of a time when I’d already learned to walk. I don’t even recall the learning process—getting up, falling down, getting up again, falling down again. I don’t have any trouble believing it happened, but I can’t remember it.

But I can specifically remember crawling, come to think of it. It was after I’d learned to walk, long after, and I think I must have been four years old. I couldn’t have been more than that, because we were still living on Buffalo’s Parkside Avenue, and I was not yet five when we moved a couple of blocks to Starin Avenue. And I couldn’t have been less than that, either, because I crawled across the living room floor to look at the newspaper. So I was old enough to read, or at least to make out a fair number of words.

So I’d been walking for quite some time, and I was sitting on the floor doing God knows what, and I wanted to look at the paper, and I was about to stand up and walk over there. And then the thought came to me that I didn’t have to do that, that I could just stay down there where I was and crawl. I remember thinking that would be fun, and I remember doing it, but I can’t remember if it was fun or not. My guess is that it was.

I don’t believe I’ve crawled since, except perhaps metaphorically. But I’m sure I could if I had to.

I’M SORRY I can’t remember learning to walk. Because it was a miracle.

Oh, not a personal miracle—although, given my own innate clumsiness, it might well have been a marginally greater achievement for me than for the average incipient toddler. No, I’ve come to believe that learning to walk is a remarkable accomplishment for the entire human species, and not so much a miracle of evolution as a triumph of the will.

Nobody’s born knowing how to do it. Grazing animals are on their feet and walking from the moment their mothers drop them; they have to be, or they won’t keep up with the herd. But human infants are born as helpless as hamsters, and walking is something they have to learn.

Or teach themselves, one might say. You can’t read the manual, and, except by example, it’s not something your parents can teach you. You crawl for a while, and then you stand up, and then you fall down. And you stand up and fall down again, and then the time comes when you stand up and take a few steps before falling down.

And so on.

And here’s what makes it a miracle: Every child, but for the severely handicapped, does all this and does it successfully. Some are early walkers, some are late walkers. Some fall a little and some fall a lot. But, sooner or later, everybody walks.

Nobody gets discouraged. Nobody gives up. Everybody stays with the program. And all this with no reward promised or punishment threatened, no hope of heaven or fear of hell, no carrot and no stick. Fall, rise, fall, rise, fall, rise—and walk.

Amazing.

Imagine, if you will, an adult in similar circumstances. Imagine the thoughts running through the adult mind:

The hell with this. What’s the point in getting up when I’m only going to fall back down again? If I keep this up I’m only going to hurt myself. And look like all kinds of a damn fool while I’m at it.

What was so bad about crawling? I was pretty good at it. I got around just fine. Why would God give us hands and knees if he didn’t expect us to get from place to place on them?

Who says everybody’s meant to walk? It works for some people, but that doesn’t mean it works for everybody. You need balance, for one thing, and you need good foot-eye coordination, and some of us aren’t gifted in those departments.

I hate falling down. Makes me feel like a failure. Why reinforce that feeling by repeating the process?

It’s hopeless.

What’s the point, anyway? I mean, it’s not as if there’s any place I really have to get to. What’s so bad about right here?

Screw it. If crawling’s not good enough for them, they can pick me up and carry me. Because I’ve had it.